LONG CAREER AT SEA

Southland Times, Issue 20641, 13 November 1928, Page 10

LONG CAREER AT SEA

THREE MILLION MILES.

RECORD OF CAPTAIN HEMMING.

London, September 21

Captain F. A. Hemming, who has just retired from the New Zealand Shipping Company, has spent 48 years at sea, and estimate sthat he has travelled three million miles.

“I started on the sea in 1880, and served seven years in sailing ships, and then I went into steam,” Captain Hemming says. “I joined the Canadian and Australian Royal Mail Steamship Company and sailed between Sydney and Vancouver for 15 years. I was first officer and then commander of the Miowera, and in that ship I sailed a million miles. This is a record, as far as I know.

When the companv was sold I joined the New Zealand Shipping Company and sailed between London and New Zealand, and I remained with them until I retired. In the last 20 years I have only been in two ships. I was in one for three years, and in the other, the Rimutaka, for the last seventeen years. In fact, I only left her the other day. In that ship I travelled 800,000 miles.”

Captain Hemming said that his father went to sea when he was a boy and joined the Honourable East India Company. He obtained his master’s certificate and applied for the post of commander of the first P. and O. steamer. Because he did not get it, he left the sea and became a barrister, later a K.C., and afterwards a county court judge. “I was at sea all through the war,” Captain Hemming added. “I sailed around England, China, and a great many other places in those four years, and I never saw a raider, a submarine, or a mine. In fact, I never saw the enemy in the air, on, or under the water.”

Speaking of the change from sail to steam, he said that he remembered one of the clippers belonging to the New Zealand Company passing a steamer, also owned by the company, circling round it, and then sailing away from it. For the present Captain Hemming will live in London, where he has a house. Later he will go for a visit to New York, and it is not outside the bounds of possibility that he will some day revisit New Zealand.